[R] licensing of R packages

[Carlos Ungil]

Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> 
> This misconception of the license terms comes about because of the
> use of the word 'use'. If I distribute a short C program that has a
> call in it to a function that has the same name as something in the
> GSL, does my C program use the GSL? No. Maybe it _mentions_ the GSL,
> but the GPL has no problems with that.

Maybe the GPL has no problems with that, but GSL authors will have. For
example, regarding a similar situation one of the GSL authors commented:

[http://sourceware.org/ml/gsl-discuss/2001-q4/msg00033.html]
> Any distributed code which refers to GSL functions should be licensed
> to the end-user under the GPL.  The intent of the GPL is that we make
> our code free to other people if they do the same for us --- two-way
> cooperation.  The current R-quant license is not a free software
> license so there should not be anything distributed under that license
> which directly refers to GSL functions.


Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> 
> I'm distributing my C program, and not the GPL-covered code, so I can
> license it how I like.
> 

And the copyright owners have recourse to legal action if they think there
is a license violation. Again, I don't know what a court would decide, but
if you want to test the limits of the GPL license I would avoid challenging
a GNU project :-)

Cheers,

Carlos

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